U.N. Ambassador Bolton, McGovern, authors headline Thompson season

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton will lead off the 2006-07 E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a lecture at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 8 at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, 301 N. 12th St.

Bolton's lecture is the first of five in this year's series. All Thompson Forum lectures are free and open to the public. Other lecturers in the forum's 19th season are culture and political expert and best-selling author Azar Nafisi, statesman George McGovern, author and economist Clyde Prestowitz, and public health expert and best-selling author Sherwin Nuland. The forum's 2006-07 theme is "Challenges and Change."

Bolton was appointed by President George W. Bush as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations on Aug. 1, 2005. Prior to his appointment, Bolton served as Under secretary of state for arms control and international security from 2001-2005. He was senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute and spent many years of his career in public service, serving as assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the Department of State, 1989-1993; assistant attorney general, Department of Justice, 1985-1989; assistant administrator for program and policy coordination (1982-83) and general counsel (1982-83), U.S. Agency for International Development.

In private legal practice, he was an associate at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling from 1974-81 and 1983-85. From 1993-99, he was a partner in the firm of Lerner, Reed, Bolton & McManus. Bolton was born Nov. 20, 1948, in Baltimore. He graduated with a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Other Thompson Forum speakers and dates are:

Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m.: Azar Nafisi, 11th Annual Governor's Lecture in the Humanities, co-sponsored by the Nebraska Humanities Council and the University of Nebraska. Nafisi, author of the national bestseller "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," is the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics. She held a fellowship from Oxford and taught English literature in Iran at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University.

Nov. 9, 7 p.m.: George McGovern. McGovern served in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972. After leaving the Senate in 1980, he was a visiting professor at a number of institutions, including Columbia, Northwestern, Duke and Cornell universities in the United States and the University of Berlin in Germany. He served as president of the Middle East Policy Council from 1991 until 1998, when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. In 2001, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan named him honorary United Nations global ambassador on world hunger.

Feb. 8, 7 p.m.: Clyde Prestowitz, the Lewis E. Harris Lecture on Public Policy. Prestowitz is founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank influential in the areas of international trade policy and specialized in how key sectors of the U.S. and world economy adapt to change, in particular the effects of globalization. Prestowitz served as counselor to the secretary of commerce in the Reagan administration and led many U.S. trade and investment negotiations with Japan, China, Latin America and Europe. His latest book, "Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East," deals with the economic rise of Asia and the upcoming rebalancing of the world economic order and its impact on the United States. He is also the author of "Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions," and the best-selling book on U.S.-Japan relations, "Trading Places."

March 22, 7 p.m.: Sherwin Nuland, the Kripke Lecture, co-sponsored by UNL's Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies. Nuland, M.D., is clinical professor of surgery at the Yale University School of Medicine and a fellow at Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies. He is the author of nine books, including "Doctors: The Biography of Medicine," "The Wisdom of the Body, The Mysteries Within," "Lost in America: A Journey with My Father," and "The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis." His book "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter," won the National Book Award and spent 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

For 19 years, the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues has brought a diversity of view points on international and public policy issues to UNL and the citizens of Nebraska to promote understanding and to encourage debate. The forum seeks out forceful speakers who are committed to the issues they address, seeking balance over the range of its programs rather than in each presentation. The forum does not endorse the views of the individual speakers nor limit their freedom to express their points of view.

The Thompson Forum is a cooperative project of the Cooper Foundation, the Lied Center and UNL. It has a mission of promoting better understanding of world events and issues to all Nebraskans. In 1990, the series was named in honor of E.N. "Jack" Thompson (1913-2002), a 1933 graduate of the University of Nebraska, who served as president of the Cooper Foundation from 1964 to 1990 and as its chairman from 1990 until his death.

More information about the Thompson Forum is available online at www.unl.edu/unlpub/special/thompsonforum.

Contacts:Annette Wetzel, University Communications, (402) 472-8524,

Kelly Bartling, (news), University Communications, (402) 472-2059